Following Her National Book Award Winning Door In The Mountain New And Collected Poems, 1965 2003, Jean Valentine Returns With A Meditative And Magical New Collection In Little Boat, Valentine Continues Her Exploration Of Spiritual Life, Confronting The Realities Of Aging And Death In The Serene And Dreamlike Voice So Beloved By Her Many Readers Infusing Even The Most Melancholy Subjects With Warmth And Humanity, Little Boat Explores Such Subjects As Grief, Ordinary Objects, Illness, And Memory, Carrying The Reader Into Disparate Worlds, Rendering The Complexity Of Our Common Experience Through Startling Images The Poet S Extraordinary Juxtapositions Blur The Boundaries Of The Material World And The Invisible, The Given And The Assumed, The Present And The Sometimes Recently Absent Readers Will Find Valentine S Quiet Epiphanies On Rich Display Here, As This Much Heralded Poet Quietly Merges The Sorrowful And The Sublime.

This book came alive on its second reading In between readings, I listened to Valentine read aloud some of her poems Her voice was so incredibly vulnerable that it felt bold to me I don t pretend to always understand what is happening in her poems, but because they are so little, they are so intense When she doubles a word or uses the motif of halves , you really feel and experience its often uncanny weight Another intensity is her divergent forms like the exclamation mark, only hav This book came alive on its second reading In between readings, I listened to Valentine read aloud some of her poems Her voice was so incredibly vulnerable that it felt bold to me I don t pretend to always understand what is happening in her poems, but because they are so little, they are so intense When she doubles a word or uses the motif of halves , y...

A few poems I love from this book In MemoryI was over at your place,but you weren t there.The window was covered a leafy gold screen,but it was a gate, locked, double locked,and over that, thick double velvet drapes And then, out of the winter blue,there leapt from branch to branch thismonkey armed woman.Jumping on my back,suffering things She wasAddiction I guess,but life, too,skating on axes on her frozen sea,life demanding life Flying life,demanding to not know,demanding to know.You Did y A few poems I love from this book In MemoryI was over at your place,but you weren t there.The window was covered a leafy gold screen,but it was a gate, locked, double locked,and over that, thick double velvet drapes And then, out of the winter blue,there leapt from branch to branch thismonkey armed woman.Jumping on my back,suffering things She wasAddiction I guess,but life, too,skating on axes on her frozen sea,life demanding life Flying life,demanding to not know,demanding to know.You Did you ever thinkyou could do something useful You know.Radiant Hospital ScrapsScraps of hard feelingsleft on ...

The best way to read this book is all the way through as one poem in one sitting It is amazing this way in this way what is happening and being said will be understood intuitively, rather than trying to find a...

I like the spareness of the poems Then again, one has to be in the mood for it.This was my favorite because I felt satiated, without having to chew too hard Hospital ScrapsScraps of hard feelingsleft on the floorwinter materialBut out the windo...

More ephemeral than other volumes I have read by Valentine, this one captures the lightness of life in choppy waters the artist poling her boat through the passage between the birth and death with a reverence that has been won looking for the other which may be her own soul.